IN MODERN business, collaboration is next to godliness. Firms shove their staff into open-plan offices to encourage serendipitous encounters. Managers oblige their underlings to add new collaborative tools such as Slack and Chatter to existing ones such as e-mail and telephones. Management thinkers urge workers to be good corporate citizens and help each other out all the time.

The fashion for collaboration makes some sense. The point of organisations is that people can achieve things collectively that they cannot achieve individually. Talking to your colleagues can spark valuable insights. Mixing with people from different departments can be useful. But this hardly justifies forcing people to share large noisy spaces or bombarding them with electronic messages.Oddly, the cult of collaboration has reached its apogee in the very arena where the value of uninterrupted concentration is at its height: knowledge work. Open-plan offices have become near-ubiquitous in knowledge-intensive companies. Facebook has built what is said to be the world’s biggest such open space, of 430,000 square feet (40,000 square metres), for its workers. Read the rest of this entry »

A PRIMARY TASK OF
LEADERSHIP IS TO
DIRECT ATTENTION.
Grouping these modes of attention into three
broad buckets—focusing on yourself, focusing on
others, and focusing on the wider world—sheds
new light on the practice of many essential leadership skills. Focusing inward and focusing constructively on others helps leaders cultivate the primary elements of emotional intelligence. A fuller understanding
of how they focus on the wider world can
improve their ability to devise strategy, innovate,
and manage organizations.
Every leader needs to cultivate this triad of
awareness, in abundance and in the proper balance,
because a failure to focus inward leaves you rudderless,
a failure to focus on others renders you clueless,
and a failure to focus outward may leave you
blindsided.
Focusing on Yourself
Emotional intelligence begins with self-awareness—
getting in touch with your inner voice. Leaders who
heed their inner voices can draw on more resources
To do so, leaders must learn to focus their own attention.
When we speak about being focused, we commonly mean thinking about one thing while filtering out distractions.
But a wealth of recent research in neuroscience shows that we focus in many ways, for different purposes, drawing on different neural pathways—some of which work in concert, while others tend to stand in opposition.

The management writer and academic explains why he believes companies that empower and train people at all levels to lead can create competitive advantage.

May 2013

The latest M-Prize challenge, cosponsored by Gary Hamel’s Management Innovation eXchange (MIX), Harvard Business Review, and McKinsey, asks managers to submit examples of how their organizations are empowering and training individuals to lead even when they lack formal authority. In this video, Professor Hamel discusses why he believes it is vital for companies to “syndicate the work of leadership” across the organization, to redistribute power, and to change the role of the top team. This interview was conducted by McKinsey Publishing’s Simon London. What follows is an edited transcript of Hamel’s remarks.

Interview transcript

Syndicating the work of leadership

The Management Innovation eXchange is the world’s first open-innovation platform, where we’re trying to elicit bleeding-edge practices in the world of management and organization and leadership. Every so often, we run a McKinsey–Harvard Business Review management prize (M-Prize) to pull those amazing new practices and those bleeding-edge ideas up to the surface.

This time around, the challenge is what we call Leaders Everywhere. And the thought underneath this is that we live in a world where never before has leadership been so necessary but where so often leaders seem to come up short. Our sense is that this is not really a problem of individuals; this is a problem of organizational structures—those traditional pyramidal structures that demand too much of too few and not enough of everyone else.

So here we are in a world of amazing complexity and complex organizations that just require too much from those few people up top. They don’t have the intellectual diversity, the bandwidth, the time to really make all these critical decisions. There’s a reason that, so often in organizations, change is belated, it is infrequent, it is convulsive. Read the rest of this entry »

To marketers, the prospect of reaching shoppers through their smartphones is tantalizing. But mobile doesn’t always mean on the go. New data show that 68% of consumers’ smartphone use happens at home. And users’ most common activity is not shopping or socializing but engaging in what researchers at BBDO and AOL call “me time.”

Seven primary motivations
The reasons consumers use smartphones can be broken down into the goals listed at right, along with the average monthly minutes and percentage of interactions devoted to each.